


All Bleeding Stops

by Deannie



Series: In Your Head Bingo [3]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 13:01:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1899924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jackson was the first to drop, blank eyes staring at nothing. Cam nearly shot the smug look off the leader’s face as Teal’c and then Sam followed suit.<i> Written for hc_bingo, prompt: theft.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	All Bleeding Stops

**Author's Note:**

> Themed bingo: In Your Head. All stories must be written from single character perspective and the majority of the story must be that character with no real-time interaction with others (meaning flashbacks and imagined discussions are acceptable, but actual conversations are not).
> 
> Timing note: Set in an amorphous hole between "Ex Deus Machina" and "Babylon."

Cameron Mitchell let out a holler as his leg collapsed under him and the cell door slammed shut.

“You will be brought before the Mennesker tribunal at dawn,” the guard said, though Cam wasn’t really paying attention. “Your collusion with the Soul Stealers will not go unpunished.”

“Nothing ever does,” Cam muttered, ignoring the man when the guard looked at him coldly once more and then shut the door to the cellblock, leaving him alone.

He let out another groan of pain as he heaved himself to his feet and lurched over to the bench that seemed to grow organically from the stone wall with the single, solitary window. High up, of course. Not that he cared.

Cam dropped onto the bench and stared down at his bleeding leg, trying to come up with a reason to staunch the blood flow and see about escaping from this damn planet.

Revenge was always a good choice. Justice had a nice ring to it. Spite—well, hell, he’d lived on that half his damn life, hadn’t he? Returning to your teammates… See, now that’s where it all went a little sideways.

 

His mind shot back to their first moments on P44-956, known as Hjem. Rumor had it that a Prior had been visiting in recent weeks. Lord, it was like chasing chickens trying to keep ahead of these guys.

Sam had been engrossed in the strange electromagnetic readings the second they walked through the gate, Jackson had immediately started reading symbols on the rocks, and Cam and Teal’c had stood sentry over both of them because Jackson was oblivious and, soldier or not, give Sam Carter a strange electromagnetic reading and she was just as bad.

Though in this case, it was clear they should have been paying more attention to the little details.

Nine-Five-Six was a bit of a brain twister to look at. Something in the soil made it all reds and oranges. Not “Fall in New England” red and orange, but day-glo body paint red and orange. The tall redwood-like trees would have looked normal but for their electric tangerine bark and shocking pink needles, and in the distance, Cam could see what looked like a moderately large neon-tinted settlement. Far enough away to give the populace time to react should there be an attack through the gate, it was still close enough that their arrival had probably been noticed. He kept an eye on the village, watching as Teal’c just naturally covered the rest of the landscape.

Damn, they really were a team, he’d thought with an internal smile.

 

The satisfaction of that moment soured in his stomach now, as his muscles spasmed around the wound in his thigh. It was bleeding pretty good. He should probably do something about that.

Probably.

 

“Well, the inscription is Asgard,” Daniel had said, running a hand over one of the stones that towered over the gate clearing, five on either side. Each of them had what looked like public announcements. Probably were.

Jackson continued his explanation. “The people here, the Mennesker, are protected by Magni, a lesser god in Norse mythology—son of Thor and god of strength. The inscription warns against ‘those who would steal the power of men’s souls,’ saying they will ‘hold in thrall the body and hide away the soul.’”

“Goa’uld,” Sam had answered, eyes still trained on her scanner.

Daniel nodded. “Travellers are warned to be wary of them. The ‘soul stealers’ themselves are warned not to visit Hjem, lest they feel Magni’s divine retribution.”

At that Sam looked up. “Like Thor’s Hammer ‘divine retribution’?” She nodded at her scanner. "That might explain the energy readings I'm getting. There could be an extraction device nearby."

Cam shrugged. “Could be useful.” He knew a certain obese Goa’uld he wouldn’t mind shoving into something like that. That brought up thoughts of Vala, and he tried to shake it off and concentrate on the problem at hand.

Daniel was obviously fighting the same battle. “Yes, well… It definitely makes sense to make contact with the people here—see if we can get some more information.”

Cam had looked at the smoke rising from the home fires in the distance. “Well, alright, then,” he said, settling his P90 on its chest clip and heading toward the distant settlement. “Let’s go.”

Which was, of course, when everything went to shit.

There was some invisible barrier, some line in the nonexistent sand. He had just stepped out of the ring of stone marking the gate platform, and Sam was only a step behind, when automatic gun batteries—disturbingly Earth-like on such an alien world—sprang up on three sides of them and started firing.

They all dove for cover, Cam and Teal’c falling back toward the gate. He used the rune-covered stones as protection and did a quick head count. Teal’c had landed heavily next to him and was bleeding from the shoulder, ignoring the injury as only Teal’c could. Carter and Jackson were hunkered down behind some rocks about 100 feet beyond them. They looked okay.

After the initial salvo, the guns had gone silent, and Cam quickly figured out why.

Soldiers were approaching from the village at a fast clip, rifle-like weapons in hand.

“There seems to be some misunderstanding here, fellas!” Cam had shouted, watching his team and resisting the urge to stand up and maybe get his head blown off. “We just came by for a friendly visit!”

“You consort with the stealers of souls,” one of the men called, venom dripping from his words. “You shall have no welcome here.” The extra decoration on his uniform—which was a glaring shade of some electric beige—marked him as a high-ranking officer. There were a dozen soldiers, all told, and all had their weapons trained on SG-1.

Daniel stood, hands up and body open to any random bullet. “Damn it, Jackson!” Cam hissed.

“We aren’t Goa’uld,” Daniel told them, all the sincerity in the world in his voice. “The Stealers of Souls are not within us.” Nice words, but Cam could see it wasn’t enough, and so could Sam and Teal’c. As a unit, the three of them came out from cover, guns pointed at the ground but ready to shoot if necessary.

“The gods know of your deception, Soul Stealer. It was they who raised the alarm and told us of your coming.”

What the hell? The system came on automatically, clearly, but special, just for them? Sam was thinking hard, he could see, but he came up with the answer at almost the same time, for once. Naquadah.

“The warning system must react to the naquadah in our blood,” she offered quietly. “It must not be able to tell the difference between a symbiote and the leftover markers.”

“We have thrown off the shackles of the Goa’uld,” Teal’c stated with all the gravity he could muster. It could work, Cam thought bleakly. “We are free.”

The leader of the soldiers sneered at him, and Cam tightened his grip on his P90.

Or not.

“The gods will decide your fate,” the man said ominously, raising a wrist to show a glowing amber armlet. He pressed a blue jewel on the back of his wrist.

Doesn’t take long to kill three innocent people, if you do it right. Cam was guessing either the Asgard didn’t have the knack of it or they wanted it to hurt.

Sam, Daniel, and Teal’c had all just stood stock still as a volley of lightning seemed to launch itself out of the stones surrounding the gate and aim directly for the three of them.

Teal’c, being Teal’c, didn’t make a sound at first, but after a long second, his bellow of agony mixed with Sam’s and Daniel’s.

 

Cam could admit it to himself, slowly bleeding to death here in this cell. He kind of lost it.

 

“Turn the damn thing off!” he'd shouted, P90 coming up at aim at the leader. “They are NOT Goa’uld!”

The leader had simply watched impassively as SG-1, minus Cam, shook in agony. “The God of Strength has judged, and found them lacking.”

Cam targeted the man to the right of the leader and fired, hitting him high in the shoulder. “The God of Strength can go straight to Hell!” he gritted, ignoring the dozen or more guns now aimed only at him. “Let. Them. Go.”

Jackson was the first to drop, blank eyes staring at nothing. Cam nearly shot the smug look off the leader’s face as Teal’c and then Sam followed suit. The lightning died as if it had never been there.

“It is, and always was, out of our hands, collaborator,” he told Cam. He then addressed his own men, not even seeming to notice that his right-hand man was down and hadn’t gotten back up again. “Bring him.”

Yeah, Cam had thought coldly, screw that!

 

Fat lot of good it had done him, he thought now, watching with a sort of bleak fascination as the smear of blood on the floor started to grow into a little puddle. He should do something about that.

He’d stood his ground and taken down three more of the armed men before five rushed him, giving a sixth a chance to get into position and take him out with that well-placed leg shot.

And all the time, his team’s bodies had lain still and abandoned.

He banged the back of his head hard against the wall behind him. “Great job, Mitchell,” he muttered to himself quietly. “‘Outstanding leadership skills,’ my ass.”

Landry was going to be pissed. Hell, General O’Neill was going to kill him. If he lived through whatever this tribunal was tomorrow.

Cam was pretty sure Sam and O’Neill were more than comrades in arms and the connection between the general and Teal’c was legend. Cam had seen how protective of Jackson the old man was—he was pretty sure O’Neill wouldn’t take kindly to him being killed off again.

Shit.

The funniest part of this, if there was a funny part at all, was that these people called the Goa’uld soul stealers, but he felt like he was the one who’d been robbed. Again.

Damn, you know, all he’d wanted was to join SG-1. He hadn’t wanted to lead the damn thing, necessarily, just... be part of the legend. He’d gotten to know Sam fairly well while he recovered from the battle in Antarctica. She’d visited him in the hospital—they all had—to thank him for saving their asses, and he'd talked with her for a long time that first day. She’d visited a few more times, when she had the time. They had a lot in common, it turned out, and while they were hardly close buddies, he’d counted her a friend.

Teal’c was... Damn, Teal’c was something. He was cool. Cam was pretty sure the Jaffa thought his new colonel was an idiot most days, but he was warming up to him. Jackson, too… They had a chance to be a real team. A damn good team.

And now the chance was gone. Stolen.

Damn, he was tired.

The puddle grew.

He should do something about that.

 

_“They’re hard to kill,” Major Bixby had told him confidently._

Cam’s head jerked up and he groaned at the pain of a stiff neck. He’d passed out somewhere in there. There was light starting to ghost through the window at the top of the wall. His gaze drifted down to his leg, where it looked like maybe the bleeding had slowed down. Maybe even stopped.

“Hell, Cameron,” he grunted, shifting slightly to ease the crick in his neck and remembering an old joke that just wasn’t that funny today. “All bleeding stops.”

Teal’c’s shoulder probably stopped not long after the lightning let him go. A body only bled as long as the heart beat.

_“They’re hard to kill.”_

The memory rattled around in his brain. Cam and his flyboys had been waiting to be deployed and SG-1 had, of course, been missing and presumed dead. It happened a lot. Bixby had just told them to cool their jets, bide their time, and be ready to move when The Team returned, because, “They’re hard to kill.”

“Not hard enough,” Cam muttered, shaking his head to dispel the last look he’d had of the three teammates he’d been so damned eager to finally take out in the field. Thank God Sam’s eyes had been closed but Jackson’s had gone a weird kind of muddied brown as his natural blue mixed with the strange light on this planet, making him look even more unreal and more dead. Teal’c had fallen face first, so there was no last look at his face, just the still coldness of death....

_Lucky me,_ Cam thought to himself. He’d apparently managed to do the one thing Anubis, the Replicators, and all the system lords put together hadn’t been able to do. He’d killed SG-1.

“Should’ve stayed at Area 51, Sam,” he sighed aloud.

“And miss all this?” came a voice that he really shouldn’t be hearing. “Where’s the fun in that?”

She was dead, right?

“Carter?” he asked, his voice at half strength—which was better than the rest of him. “You’re dead, right?”

“We are not.”

Cam snorted at Teal’c’s deadpan answer, hissing at the pain of another spasm. He really should have taken care of that leg.

“Well that’s damn good to hear, Teal’c,” he replied, still feeling dazed. He looked around. “Where the hell are you?”

“At the window,” Sam murmured.

Cam turned on the bench and craned his sore neck, then tried to stand up to see better. He ended flat on his back on the floor as his leg gave out, but at least he could see the vague shapes of Sam and Teal’c kneeling at the window. So only two, then. Better than nothing, he guessed.

“Colonel Mitchell, you are injured.”

He ignored Teal’c’s comment as he tried to figure the two of them out. How were they kneeling so high up there?

“Cameron?”

He ignored Sam, too. “How’d y’all get up there?” Man, he was dizzy!

“Daniel, how’s it going at the door?” Sam asked. He heard it echo in the radio the soldiers had never thought to take from him. She sounded worried there, too. “Mitchell’s injured.”

“Bleeding’s stopped,” Cam muttered, waving a hand negligently to dispel her worry. “All bleeding stops.” _I should really get with it,_  he thought foggily.

“I’m in.”

Jackson’s serious whisper was in his ear and down the hall, and it cleared his head a little more. Cam tried to rally and get himself the hell together. Three for three, back from the dead—because that was what SG-1 _did_. He wasn’t going to be the weak link that prevented them from getting the hell out of here, now was he?

With a hiss and a sigh, he rolled over and pushed himself up to his elbows. He didn’t seem to be able to get much farther right at the moment. How was he going to get to his feet with that leg?

“Hey, Mitchell. Looks like you could use a hand.”

Cam looked up through the bars into a face whose eyes were blue in the uncertain light of the prison torches. Daniel held a ring of keys and set about trying to open the cell door.

“Jackson,” he drawled back, finally settling on swinging his injured leg out to the side and kneeling on the other knee. “Wouldn’t have a set of crutches on you, would you?”

The door squeaked open and Jackson was hauling him to his feet and throwing Cam’s arm over his shoulder. “Sorry. I can give you a shoulder to lean on, though.” He looked Cam up and down, trying to assess the damage in the flickering light. “You going to make it?”

Cam snorted. “I have a choice?”

“Not really, no,” Daniel said, getting them moving and half-carrying him out of the cellblock past the body of a guard. Dead or unconscious, Cam didn’t know or care.

“Then I’m fine, thanks for asking.” He took a deep breath of cold night air as they slid into the shadows just outside the jail. They turned the corner at the end of the wall and started climbing, and Cam realized that the structure had been built into the mountainside. His cell’s high window was only a foot off the ground, he saw, as they reached the place where Sam and Teal’c now stood, keeping watch.

“It doesn’t look like they get many dangerous criminals,” Sam offered as she led the way along a dirt track in the lightening forest. “We haven’t seen anyone else.”

“Yeah, that’s going to change,” Cam told them, gritting his teeth and pushing Jackson to move faster. “The tribunal is supposed to start at dawn.”

Sam nodded. “Teal’c, go on ahead and make sure no one’s guarding the gate—”

“Don’t get close enough to set off the security system,” Cam murmured, earning himself an annoyed look for stating the obvious. It did bring up a point, though. And at least a couple of questions.”How are we going to get past it without alerting them or getting shot to pieces? And why aren’t you dead?”

“We think the system was originally designed like Thor’s Hammer—it was supposed to kill the symbiote, not the host,” Sam explained as Teal’c hared off. “But it must have been damaged at some point. It delivered a huge electric shock instead.”

“I'll say—y’all were _dead_ ,” Cam insisted.

Jackson shrugged under his shoulder. “More like short circuited. We woke up in a small cave on the other side of the village a few hours ago. Not even a guard on us. They really must have thought we were dead—”

“I sure as hell did,” Cam broke in petulantly.

He hadn’t meant to say it quite that way, but Daniel turned his head and gave him a penetrating look. “Yeah. Sorry for that.”

Cam laughed at himself. He was seriously going to be put out because they were _alive_? “This coming back from the dead thing takes some getting used to, is all.”

“We were pretty worried when you weren’t there, too, you know,” Sam told him, slowing the pace now they’d reached the edge of the large clearing around the stargate. “Figured we’d be looking for a new lead singer.”

He smiled at that, then swallowed a scream as Jackson eased him down to the ground just inside the treeline. “So..." It took a minute for him to steady himself enough to speak normally. “I’m figuring a quick dash and dial?”

Sam crouched next to him, finding the hole in his pants and tearing it open a little more to get a look at the wound. The look on her face was almost as encouraging as his current desire to just close his eyes and nap right here. He managed to hold his protest to a low groan as she slapped a pressure bandage on his wound.

“That _was_  going to be the plan,” she admitted as Teal’c slid silently up to them.

Cam nodded reassuringly at Teal’c’s inquiring look. “Way I see it, since I won’t set off Magni’s toys, I just sneak in there, dial the gate, then you three run like hell and try not to get shot—” he looked at the pressure bandage on Teal’c’s shoulder. “Again.”

“That’s assuming the gun batteries are the only thing we have to worry about,” Jackson brought up. “I mean, we’re just assuming that the electric shock was actually controlled by that guard.” He gave Cam a serious look. “And assuming that you can actually make that distance by yourself.”

Cam shook his head and stood carefully. “Oh ye of little faith,” he muttered, testing himself. Adrenaline was a wonderful thing. He’d probably fall flat on his face once they hit the gangplank on Earth, but for now, he could hold up his part of the bargain. “And I figure, if the thing lights up again, you wouldn’t survive another attack anyway, so it doesn’t much matter.”

“Well that’s a lovely thought,” Jackson muttered. “Thanks.”

Cam grinned and took a careful step. It only _seemed_  like his leg was on fire, he was sure. And he didn’t have to run, after all. The system wasn’t keyed to _his_  blood.  “Any time, Dr. Jackson.”

He looked toward the stargate in preparation for the painful walk and cursed. “Well, hell.”

Dawn had come and gone while they made their way here, and the Mennesker had obviously figured out the escaped collaborator would want to make for the gate and... Well, _escape_. Twice as many soldiers as before were headed toward them down the village trail.

Cam squared his shoulders and pegged each of his teammates with a deadly serious glare. “Try not to get dead again, okay?”

And without giving them, or his body, a chance to protest, he lit out for the gate, running as fast as he could.

The rest of it was a hell of a blur, a minute and a half compressed into fifteen seconds in his mind. The Mennesker did a lot of shooting before one of them finally got lucky and something glanced painfully along his side. It wasn’t enough to stop him dialing the gate, though, and unarmed, he watched his team sprint toward the event horizon, holding his breath as the gun batteries started up and added their bullets to the ones his team and the Mennesker were already throwing around. Nothing else stuck, though, and Cam silently counted heads as the others barrelled through the gate without stopping.

_One... two... three… FOUR!_  He launched himself through to safety.

He actually _didn’t_  fall flat on his face when he hit the gangplank on Earth. _Stupid, Cam,_ he thought. He should have known he wouldn’t.

His team was there to catch him.

He supposed he should get used to that.

Probably.

* * * * * * *  
The End

 


End file.
